Frescoes depicting the Sack of Baz and the burning of the library flanked the exit: an incongruously narrow, austere archway that you might miss if it weren’t for the statue of Saunt Cartas cradling a few singed and tattered books in one arm, looking back over her shoulder to beckon us toward the exit. This led to a high stone-walled chamber, devoid of decoration and containing nothing except air. It symbolized the retreat to the maths and the dawn of the Old Mathic Age, generally pegged at Negative 1512.
From there the Hylaean Way took a lap around the Unarian Cloister and petered out. There was room on the other side where exhibits might one day be added about the rise of the Mystagogues, the Rebirth, the Praxic Age, and possibly even the Harbingers and the Terrible Events. But we had seen all the good stuff, and this was customarily the end of the tour.
I thanked them all for coming, invited them to backtrack if they wanted to spend more time with any of what they’d seen, reminded them that all were welcome at the Tenth Night supper, and told them I’d be happy to answer questions.
The slines seemed happy for now to savor the pictures of Imperial Bazian galley combat and library-burning. A retired burger stepped up to thank me for my time. The suvin kids asked me what sorts of things I had been studying lately. The two visitors who had rushed in at the last minute bided their time as I tried to explain to the kids certain theorical topics that they’d never heard of. After a minute the nun took pity on me (or possibly on the kids) and hustled them away.
The latecomers were a man and a woman, both probably in their fifth decades of life. I did not get the sense that they were having a liaison. Both were attired for commerce, so perhaps they were colleagues in a business. Around each one’s neck was a lanyard leading to a flasher of the type used extramuros to demonstrate one’s identity and control access to places. Since such things weren’t needed here, both of them had tucked their flashers into their breast pockets. They had been appreciative tourists, trailing the group, cocking their heads toward each other to discuss fine details that one or the other had noticed.
“I was intrigued by your remarks about the daughters of Cnoüs,” the man announced. His accent marked him as coming from a part of this continent where cities were bigger and closer together than around here, and where a concent might house a dozen or more chapters in contrast to our three.
He went on, “It’s just that normally I would expect an avout to emphasize what made them different. But I almost got the idea you were hinting at a—” And here he stopped, as though groping for a word that was not in the Fluccish lexicon.
“Common ground?” suggested the woman. “A parallel between them?” Her accent—as well as the bone structure of her face and the hue of her skin—marked her as coming from the continent that, in this age, was the seat of the Sæcular Power. And so by this point I had made up a reasonable story in my head about these two: they lived in big cities far away, they worked for the same employer, a business of global scope, they were visiting its local office for some purpose, they’d heard it was the last day of Apert and had decided to spend a couple of hours taking in the sights. Both, I guessed, had spent at least a few years in a Unarian math when younger. Perhaps the man’s Orth had grown some rust and he was more comfortable confining the discussion to Fluccish.
“Well, I think many scholars would agree that Deät and Hylaea both say that one should not confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized,” I said.
He looked as if I’d poked him in the eye. “What kind of way to begin a sentence is that? ‘I think many scholars would agree…’ Why don’t you just say what you mean?”
“All right. Deät and Hylaea both say that one should not confuse the symbol with the thing symbolized.”
“That’s better.”
“For Deät the symbol is an idol. For Hylaea it’s a triangular shape on a tablet. For Deät, the thing symbolized is an actual god in heaven. For Hylaea, it’s a pure theorical triangle in the HTW. So, do you agree that I can speak about that commonality in itself?”
“Yes,” the man said, reluctantly, “but an avout rarely takes an argument that far only to drop it. I keep waiting for you to base some further argument on it, the way they do in the dialogs.”
“I take your point clearly,” I said. “But I was not in dialog at the time.”
“But you are now!”
I took this as a joke and chuckled in a way I hoped would seem polite. His face showed a trace of dry amusement but on the whole he looked serious. The woman seemed a bit uneasy.
“But I wasn’t then,” I said, “and then I had a story to tell, and it had to make sense. It makes sense if Deät and Hylaea took the same idea and mapped it onto different domains. But if I’d described them as saying totally contradictory things about their father’s vision, it wouldn’t have made sense.”
“It would have made perfect sense if you had made Deät out to be a lunatic,” he demurred.
“Well, that’s true. Maybe because there were so many Deolaters in the group I avoided being so blunt.”
“So you said something you don’t actually believe, just to be polite?”
“It’s more a matter of emphasis. I do believe what I said before about the commonality—and so do you, because you agreed with me to that point.”
“How widespread do you suppose that mentality is within this concent?”
Hearing this, the woman looked as if she had got a whiff of something foul. She turned sideways to me and spoke in a subdued voice to the man. “Mentality is a pejorative term, isn’t it?”
“All right,” the man said, never taking his eyes off me. “How many here see it your way?”
“It’s a typical Procian versus Halikaarnian dispute,” I said. “Avout who follow in the way of Halikaarn, Evenedric, and Edhar seek truth in pure theorics. On the Procian/Faanian side, there is a suspicion of the whole idea of absolute truth and more of a tendency to classify the story of Cnoüs as a fairy tale. They pay lip service to Hylaea just because of what she symbolizes and because she wasn’t as bad as her sister. But I don’t think that they believe that the HTW is real any more than they believe that there is a Heaven.”
“Whereas Edharians do believe in it?”
The woman shot him a look, and he made the following adjustment: “I specify Edharians only because this is the Concent of Saunt Edhar, after all.”
If this man had been one of my fraas I might have spoken more freely now. But he was a Sæcular, strangely well-informed, and he behaved as though he were important. Even so, I might have blurted something out if this had been the first day of Apert. But our gates had been open for ten days: long enough for me to grow some crude political reflexes. So I answered not for myself but for my concent. More specifically for the Edharian order; for all of the Edharian chapters in other concents around the world looked to us as their mother, and had pictures of our Mynster up in their chapterhouses.
“If you ask an Edharian flat out, he’ll be reluctant to admit to it,” I began.
“Why? Again, this is the Concent of Saunt Edhar.”
“It was broken up,” I told him. “After the Third Sack, two-thirds of the Edharians were relocated to other concents, to make room for a New Circle and a Reformed Old Faanite chapter.”
“Ah, the Powers That Be put a bunch of Procians in here to keep an eye on you, did they?” This actually caused the woman to reach out and put her hand on his forearm.
“You seem to be assuming I’m an Edharian myself,” I said, “but I have not yet made Eliger. I don’t even know if the Order of Saunt Edhar would accept me.”
“I hope so for your sake,” he said.
The conversation had become steadily odder from its very beginning and had reached a point where it was difficult for me to see a way forward. Fortunately the woman got us out of the jam: “It’s just that with all that’s been going on with the Warden of Heaven, we were speculating, as we were on our way here, whether the avout were feeling any pressure to change their views. And we wondered if your take on Deät and Hylaea might have reflected some Sæcular influence.”